As computers have grown increasingly important in today's society, the use of the Internet has also increased. The increased usage of the Internet has lead to an decrease in response time as busy web sites attempt to handle a large volume of traffic.
One solution to handling large amounts of traffic at popular web sites is to cache frequently requested content from the web site at the user's computer and/or at other sites. By spreading the content requests around an increased number of locations, performance is improved by decreasing the load at a single web site.
One of the limitations to many existing caching solutions is the inability to cache content that varies based on information in the request header as opposed to the uniform resource locator (URL) indicating the content item. For example, a popular site such as Yahoo may provide localized versions of web pages based on the language information in the header of the hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) request while using the same URL.